New tab bar PhoneGap plugin for Android based on ActionBarSherlock

October 12, 2012

I just implemented a simple new plugin to add a native tab bar to the top of an existing PhoneGap application. More exactly, I extracted the plugin from work I have previously done in conjunction with my side job and also my master’s thesis about cross-platform frameworks for mobile applications (almost finished, Monday is the deadline ^^). Since I already maintain the plugins for a tab bar and navigation bar on iOS, it only made sense to also work on this one. For a personal app idea, I also want to extract a jQuery Mobile based project template that uses PhoneGap and works on both Android and iOS – but that will still take me a bit of the time I don’t have.

Here’s how the plugin looks like in action. Both text and icon labels are possible on a tab (but not both):

Example screenshot

Please try it out and report any problems over at my GitHub repo. It is very simple to use, check the README. Note that at the moment, the plugin is not yet in the upstream repository (pull requests seem to be accumulating there).